Being new to AI and from a technical problem solving area (IT engineering), I’ve been struggling a bit around the Design phase. After reading some back issue of the AI Practitioner magazine (wonderful in the high quality of the articles it features!), it stroke me that the Design phase of an AI intervention might be explained as an objectives definition phase.

Of course, it’s far more powerful as any other objectives definition, because it builds on the previous Discovery and Dream steps. I do see them as steps on a stairway, because it allows participants in the AI workshop to be higher than what some other approach would have brought them, in terms of vision and positive hopes.

I’ve feared that when trying to introduce AI to people around me (especially management), they’d see it as some sort of utopian approach. Indeed, there is a logical progression from Discovery of current reality (as appreciatively inquired into its best moments) to Dream of a better future and then a stake in the ground is done of that Dream in the form of the bold and provocative propositions (what needs to be true for the Dream to occur). Then of course, the Destiny/Deliver phase is an action plan to achieve these propositions.

I see AI as a way to reverse cause and effect relationships. One usually live in a world where past and present causes effect a (planned, anticipated) future. Now with AI, envisionned future is not just mental imagery, it’s firmly grounded and, like a lighthouse, attracting us to it. Indeed, the (dreamed of) effect is creating the necessary causes for it to exist.

I might have summarized too much of the intrinsic magic of the 4D process, but I was not trying to explain the whole AI approach in this article (maybe some other day, and in french as it’s not quite well know here…)